The production of information is critical to a healthy information diet. It's the thing that makes it so that your information consumption has purpose. I cannot think of more important advice to give anyone: start your day with a producer mindset, not a consumer mindset. If you begin your day checking the news, checking your email, and checking your notifications, you've launched yourself into a day of grazing a mindless consumption.
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But there's something else that being a producer do...

The world is changing -- it is getting both smaller and bigger at the same time. Our world shrinks as technologies now allow us to communicate both synchronously and asynchronously with peers around the world. Conversely, the explosion of information now available to us expands our view of the world. As a result of the ability to communicate globally and the information explosion, education must change. Most educators might not want to change, but the change is coming -- it is a matter of whe...

We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this p...

Let’s be clear: Trump is no fluke. Nor is he hijacking the Republican Party or the conservative movement, if there is such a thing. He is, rather, the party’s creation, its Frankenstein monster, brought to life by the party, fed by the party and now made strong enough to destroy its maker. Was it not the party’s wild obstructionism — the repeated threats to shut down the government over policy and legislative disagreements; the persistent call for nullification of Supreme Court decisi...

To give to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business;
To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts, in writing;
To improve, by reading, his morals and faculties;
To understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either;
To know his rights; to exercise with order and justice those he retains; to choose with discretion the f...

The horizontal axis here is level of taxation, and the vertical axis represents the amount of revenue the government takes in from taxpayers. On the left edge of the graph, the tax rate is 0%; in that case, by definition, the government gets no tax revenue. On the right, the tax rate is 100%; whatever income you have, whether from a business you run or a salary you’re paid, goes straight into Uncle Sam’s bag.
Which is empty. Because if the government vacuums up every cent of the wage you...

One reason companies like Facebook should be interested in what I am proposing is that planning a regulation regime is better than morphing involuntarily into a dull regulated utility, which is what would probably happen otherwise. Suppose Facebook never gets good enough at snatching the “advertising” business from Google. That’s still a possibility as I write this. In that event, Facebook could go into decline, which would present a global emergency.
It’s not an outlandish scenario....

Nor am I less persuaded, that you will agree with me in opinion, that there is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of Science and Literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness. In one in which the measures of Government receive their impression so immediately from the sense of the Community as in ours it is proportionably essential. To the security of a free Constitution it contributes in various ways: By convincing those who are...

Our ignorance is God; what we know is science. When we abandon the doctrine that some infinite being created matter and force, and enacted a code of laws for their government ... the real priest will then be, not the mouth-piece of some pretended deity, but the interpreter of nature.

Mulan started kindergarten at our local public school. And as part of her day at school, she said the “Pledge of Allegiance.” She proudly repeated it to me, and the “under God” part made me flinch. “You don’t have to say ‘under God’ you know,” I said—and her eyes widened with fear. “What do you mean?” I said, “You can just keep your mouth closed during that part. I don’t believe in God. These people in the government allowed that to get stuck in there much later. I...